Sunday, May 08, 2011

Conspiracist Blogger James Corbett Appears on the Kremlin-Financed Russia Today

James Corbett is a conspiracist with a site on the Internet. He is a 9-11 Truther. Truthers argue amongst themselves, but typically claim that 9-11 was masterminded by President George W. Bush and/or an inside job orchestrated by the U.S. government and not the work of Osama bin Laden. James Corbett claims that man-made global warming is a hoax. He claims that President Kennedy's killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, worked for the CIA.

James Corbett recently appeared on Russia Today (RT, the Kremlin-financed, English-language, propaganda satellite T.V. channel) the day after bin Laden was killed and claimed that bin Laden had deep ties to U.S. intelligence.

Russia Today is an uncritical purveyor of conspiracy theories and frequently interviews American and British conspiracists who claim that global warming is a "hoax," too. RT doesn't interview the famous scientists--Russian or Western---who understand global warming. The anti-scientific claim that global warming is a "hoax" has been a staple of Russian propaganda.

Fossil fuel companies such as Gazprom have a lot of power and own much of the media in Russia. The Russian gas company Gazprom is majority-owned by the Russian government and pays taxes that support the government.

In the U.S., Politicians like Senator Inhofe and Attorney General Cuccinelli even cite official Russian/Gazprom propaganda in defence of their global warming denialism. These politicians might want to reconsider spreading propaganda that even the Russian scientist don't agree with and stop persecuting our great scientists!

Alexander Bedritskiy, president of the World Meteorological Organization and the top climate change adviser to President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia, said that the Russian report [by Illarionov's IEA] was thoroughly discredited by top scientists in his country more than a year ago.

“Any scientific discussion on the results, pretending to be science-based, does not make sense,” Dr. Bedritskiy said in an e-mail.

He also noted that the author of that report, Andrei Illarionov, is not a climate scientist but an economist with the Cato Institute, a conservative research group in the United States.

Mr. Cuccinelli could not say how he had verified the accuracy of the report, which is written in Russian, but said that his legal complaint had been “heavily researched.” The research did not consist of consultations with scientists, however, he said.

“We have to have a certain understanding of our context to operate, but that doesn’t require expert witnesses,” he said.

Common among conspiracy theorists is the notion that bin Laden was a CIA creation and that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were blowback from an agency operation gone awry. Typifying this view is filmmaker Michael Moore, who on the day after the terrorist attacks wrote: “WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!”

In fact, during the Soviet war in Afghanistan during the 1980s, the CIA had no dealings with “Afghan Arabs” such as bin Laden and had few direct dealings with any of the Afghan mujaheddin. Instead, all U.S. aid to Afghanistan was funneled through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, the ISI. Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf, the ISI officer who coordinated Pakistani efforts during the war, explained in “The Bear Trap,” his 1992 book: “No Americans ever trained or had direct contact with the mujaheddin.”

Since 9/11, al-Qaeda insiders have responded in writing to assertions that they had some kind of relationship with the CIA. Bin Laden’s top lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in his autobiographical “Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet,” wrote, “The truth that everyone should learn is that the United States did not give one penny in aid to the [Arab] mujaheddin.” Similarly, Abu Musab al-Suri, long an associate of bin Laden’s, explained in his history of the jihadist movement, “The Call to Global Islamic Resistance”: “It is a big lie that the Afghan Arabs were formed with the backing of the CIA.”

There are very few things that al-Qaeda and the CIA agree upon — except that they have never had any relationship.

To be clear, the CIA has been in bed with plenty of questionable characters. take pol pot, he killed millions of his own people in cambodia. we funded his forces. our CIA conducts these operations. coincidentally around the same time we were arming pot's khmer rouge we were also arming resistance fighters in afghanistan in a war with the soviet union. bin laden was among these resistance fighters. the CIA knows him better as tim osman. this article is clearly a joke